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Is CG animation, just not as engaging as hand drawn Animation?


Mesme Rize

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first off all, this is not a debate about the quality of these movies, from a storyline perspective. This is just about the art style and nothing more.

 

I must say, that i miss hand drawn animation movies in modern cinema. While i don't particulary hate it, i must say that after 20 years, since Toy Story came around, i long for something different again, because these days, CG Animation is everywhere and it gets put out in Cinemas like Hamburgers at Mcdonalds.

 

It's also something that Don Bluth mentioned in his interview with the Nostalgia Critic (Link to it below) The Animators want to make these characters look more humanlike and more realistic. In that case, why not get an actor? Seriously, the fantasy is being completly killed. CG Characters look like Puppets to me, while hand drawn characters are so full of life, which you can see from their faces. I think hand drawn movies like Pinocchio are impossible to make with CG.

 

What do you think of it? Is there some truth to it, or is it just me?

 

(Here is the link. The part i mentioned starts immediatly and goes for 3 minutes)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGpupHNRgag

 

 

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I wouldn't say the same expressions or full-of-life..ness.. isn't achievable with CGI.. It's just that with CGI you can be lazy and complete something far quicker than hand drawn, and with laziness comes ignorance, and they tend to ignore some of the details.. There's also the fact that some rigs for characters aren't as fleshed out as others and you can't achieve the same expression..

 

But honestly, one of the main reasons why we separate these these two genres is because of one thing.. "Stylizing" ... With CGI people generally stick with the "best" engines that have their strongest points in realism, and thus most good animations produced with it are as such.. realistic.. Where as "Hand drawn" imagery is an old thing and isn't really used anymore.. Well.. kind of.. You see it isn't used like they used to where you'd draw a still image, paint it and compile it manually.. now it's draw a template or scripted drawing of a scene, then using computers to render it digitally.. this is almost always vector based, resulting in many great yet stylized cartoons, such as Gravity Falls, Family guy, MLP:FiM, Rick and Morty.. Even most Anime nowadays uses it.. ;)

 

There are those of us who like 3D CGI and those of us who like 2D CGI.. Some of us prefer the stylization that the 2D CGI brings as it's unusual and gets your attention, and that often makes itself and it's story more captivating.. Where 3D CGI can still achieve the same thing, but is more difficult as there's still that realism it clings to.. :huh:

 

Ultimately it comes down to preference, and there's nothing wrong with liking only one, or both! :P

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I'd like to see some new 2D hand-drawn (or nearly hand-drawn) stuff out of Disney one of these days.  The Princess and the Frog may not have been Disney's best film ever, but it was still very much worth seeing and overall well-done.

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I do have to admit that hand drawn animation is my favorite form of the animation medium.

It just feels the most alive out of all of them to speak.

There is just a sense of warmth that comes from seeing what directly came out of the animator's hands onto the film, that can't be beat.

I feel like that different styles and expressions are able to come across much more naturally and are able to convey much more emotion in 2d than in CGI.

When it comes to hand drawn animation, it is much easier to go abstract and much more absurd, yet still be visually appealing at the same time, than it to is to do so with 3D CGI.

That isn't to say that it isn't possible to do so either as one of the best examples I can think of a 3D cartoon being fluid, well-animated, visually appealing, and has a nice cartoony style and flair to it would have to be Miraculous Ladybug.

Even though at first I wished that both Moana and Zootopia would have been 2D animated instead of CGI, the animation on both of them look really good and are highly detailed with some pretty impressive locations.

So while I really want to see some more hand drawn animated films in theaters, particularly from Disney, at the same time, some of the animation for the 3D films, whether or not I wished they could have been 2D instead have been really good as well.

So my feelings are rather conflicted.

Plus I have been waiting for Disney to make a movie using the Meander animation that they used for Paperman and Feast that is a perfectly blend for both styles of animation.

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I don't know if it's more engaging but I certainly prefer hand drawn animation to computer made stuff. It looks way better in my opinion.

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While both styles have their place, I far prefer 2D cel animated movies to CG. Some of my favorite animated movies are in CG but for all the vast possibilities and technology behind CG, there are limitations as well. No one thinks about these limitations because they can do just about anything with CG, but what I'm referring to is the more intangible, but no less important, quality of hand-drawn art. Whether you are an artist or not, and whether we even realize it or not, traditional art reaches us in ways that technology just can't imitate. It has a soul and a vitality about it. CG is very beautiful and they can do some amazing things with it. Realism is off the charts these days, but it lacks the broad strokes of the old 'squash and stretch' methods that put caricature into cartoons.

 

On the other hand I wouldn't go so far as to say they could just get an actor instead of animating in CG, because compelling character design is also a big part of it, and even CG characters need it. (Incidentally, that design comes from the drawing board of a traditional artist). Movies like Polar Express and TinTin are examples of why you can't just use actors. TinTin in particular is visually stunning and a great movie, but even though its characters are stylized in a broader, more cartoony way, it's not broad enough. Polar Express does very little with its characters and is just plain disturbing to look at. Compared side by side with mainstream CG, the differences are glaring.

But then, the differences between the best CG characters and traditional 2D ones are even more glaring. 

The long and short is that both mediums, when done right, have their merits, but the successes of one should not mean the total dismissal of the other. 2D animation is a great treasure, learned and polished over decades of work by gifted artists, and should not be thrown out because of current trends. 

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